Religion Dispatches
…rom humans into pig fetuses.” Although this sounds like something out of a South Park episode in which scientists graft on a you-know-what to the back of a lab mouse so Mrs. Garrison can be a man again, or perhaps reminiscent of H. G. Wells’ Island of Doctor Moreau, this science fiction is fast becoming science. If it proves successful, this technology could dramatically reduce the long waiting lists to receive transplanted organs and tissue, the…
Read More…(51%) of almost all candidates in the Republican pool. Voters in Iowa and South Carolina (a primary the Huntsman campaign is focusing on) give Huntsman the highest “unacceptability” ratings—at 77% and 67%, respectively. Romney has the lowest “unacceptability” rating of all candidates—26%. It’s early yet, and Huntsman has a long way to go with name recognition, and he’s an unlikely fit for social conservatives, though he’s trying. He made a decent…
Read More
…The Villages. It seemed like a nice day for a drive so I thought I’d head south to attend the rally, talk to some tea partiers and listen to the speeches. Scott, whose public approval ratings are sinking in the polls, had chosen to move the signing from Tallahassee to the tea party stronghold, and in particular, this make-believe world in the middle of the state. The Villages is a surreal place. It’s like a sprawling residential Disney with faux…
Read More
…s, and the suffering on the homefront—meant liberation for 4 million newly freed people, while many others found it in the resolution to America’s most intractable division. There really was something to fight for—and over—beyond simply the chance for personal valor and national “pride.” Just a few decades later, however, that war took on a whole different meaning for most (white) Americans; a soothing story of reconciliation, shorn of almost any…
Read More…t generation was fairly ethnocentric, so Arabs would build one mosque, and South Asians another. If populations were large enough, you could get subdivided further, so that there would be a Lebanese mosque, a Syrian mosque, a Pakistani mosque, and an Indian mosque. In the second generation, those types of divides are disappearing, and many centers are becoming multi-ethnic and include African-Americans. To me, that says our next great challenge wi…
Read More…t week that, in the aftermath of the deadly tornados that swept across the South, State Representative Bobby Franklin said he was “saddened” as he watched his “fellow Georgians pray to their god FEMA to save them.” Of course the report, as well as the reader comments, came down pretty hard on Franklin for his appalling lack of sensitivity. You may remember Franklin as the state representative who proposed a bill requiring that miscarriage would be…
Read More
…72 migrants found on August 24th on a farm in a remote town just 100 miles south of the US border. Dismantling the Liberationist Legacy Liberation Theology, the radical social and theological experiment launched after the Second Vatican Council, offered both a social critique and a utopian vision for the future of Latin America. This project was, for a time, powerful and pervasive enough that it could have mitigated some of the underlying social p…
Read More
…es to Hank Williams. Our friends are second-generation American Muslims of South Asian, Arab, and African heritage, white converts, and beautiful toddlers of interracial marriages. Watching them interact, I am content, and hopeful for our future here. My husband and I push the stroller through the neighborhood after our friends leave. The festival is officially over but children are still dancing on a wooden floor as the crew dismantles the stage…
Read More
…g figure in the Jewish community than Richard Goldstone? When the esteemed South African judge issued his 2009 report alleging that Israel had committed human rights abuses during the 2008-2009 Gaza War (known as Operation Cast Lead), many in the Jewish community condemned him as a traitor. A synagogue sought to ban him from attending his own grandson’s Bar Mitzvah. On the other side, some skipped over the report’s criticisms of Hamas and the call…
Read More…not at all convinced that they would make a difference for Pain in Iowa or South Carolina, although they more obviously could in Florida. Frum, a Republican Jewish Coalition board member, complains in his column that Palin snubbed the group’s offers to sponsor her Israel trip, as it has done for other presidential hopefuls, instead booking it through a Christian tour agency. He thinks, perhaps, that Palin is miffed that he and other RJC board memb…
Read More